


imbrued

by blooddrool



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Blood Drinking, M/M, bloodborne au, bloodborne version of a meet cute, wound fingering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-29
Updated: 2020-05-29
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:42:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24445255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blooddrool/pseuds/blooddrool
Summary: The man's hand comes close, the vial held within it dark and shining in the dim, orange light.  Jonathan breathes deeply — as deeply as he can before his stomach spasms with pain — and swears that he can smell it.  That smell like no other, that smell likeeveryother.Blood.
Relationships: Jonathan Fanshawe/Jonah Magnus
Comments: 13
Kudos: 37





	imbrued

**Author's Note:**

> this is bloodborne!au but you shouldn't need any understanding of the game to get the fic !  
> ty to the wonderful lovely spectacular mads for the beta !!!
> 
> inspired by the following art by sj/focsle: https://focsle.tumblr.com/post/616691948533727232

It’s a bit funny, really. Jonathan is more aware of the blood pooling beneath him than he is of the wound it spills from. His blood spreads and seeps, soaking into his coat, his trousers, dark and thick, and Jonathan finds himself keenly aware of the way his clothing softens, the way it grows heavy in odd places. The way it touches his skin and sticks, peels away when he winces.

The pain is still _there_ , of course, but it is– Well, Jonathan hasn’t made the mistake of considering it secondary. Oh no, certainly not. But quieter, perhaps. Less immediate. He still throbs where he’s sliced open, still shakes with each bright pulse of clean-cut agony. It lances through him, colder even than the air that fogs his breath. And, still, Jonathan catches himself concerned for the stains.

What did he call it — funny? Yes, he supposes that’s apt. Funny. In actuality: a heady combination of adrenaline and shock, but Jonathan discarded rational thinking the moment he boarded that eerie, impossible carriage. He’d been running thin on alternate options — the answers he needed were not to be found in the University, the Workshop, the _Church_. If any were still sane enough to do so, he is certain his peers and superiors would forgive his turn to the heretical — for even they, in whatever fleeting, final moments of coherency they’d surely possessed, must have understood the urgency of the situation.

Though, Jonathan amends, his options appear significantly slimmer now that his lifeblood is pouring steadily out of him.

Yes. Funny. Jonathan stares up at the ceiling (beautiful, high, vaulted), books and blood spread all about him, and clutches at the wound in his side.

And the man who put it there– The man who put it there steps forward. His boots tap quietly across the floor, the soft skid of leather over hardwood. Jonathan hears him pause, step again, pause. Walking around his blood, Jonathan realizes, and feels slightly hysterical with the thought, a laugh tightening in his belly and catching in his chest as he seizes with the pain of it. The man who sheathed his weapon in his own blood, stepping daintily around Jonathan’s. _Funny_ indeed.

“Still with us, then?” the man asks — or taunts, maybe, but Jonathan is far beyond rising, much less defending himself.

He wheezes, instead, swallows thickly. Flinches as a boot lands close to his head.

The man looms over him, head tilted the way a crane might tilt its head at a fish swimming between its feet. His eyes are bright — this is what Jonathan notes first about him, of course. His eyes are bright. Nearly luminescent in the dark, unlit library. His pupils are dilated but round, _perfectly_ round, irises held firmly within their bounds. Free of collapse, free of the sickness that devoured the minds of Jonathan’s colleagues. Perhaps that would be a comfort, if not for the way he smiles, slow and slick and sharp like a thing pulled from the mud and best put right back.

“Bad luck,” the man says. His eyes flash the same red as the lining of his cloak, deep and rich. Like mahogany shelving in a library that never ends, the bones of a hoard of leather-bound secrets. The man blinks — and somehow Jonathan finds that to be the eeriest thing about him.

“Bad luck, indeed,” he says again, leaning down, lowering his voice as though sharing a conspiracy, “You really oughtn’t be dressing yourself up as a hunter if you aren’t one.”

Jonathan grits his teeth, feels the way they creak and grind against one another. He opens his mouth to speak, but the man crouches down at his shoulder, swift and silent, and Jonathan finds his words caught in his throat.

For there is blood on the man’s face — streaked across his chin (pointed, smooth), spattered on his cheekbone (high, regal), flecked into the hair around his ear — and it suits him the way that jewels suit the throats of royalty, the way that crowns suit kings. The way that stripes suit tigers and tears suit cheetahs. The man wipes at the blood on his chin, his hand gloved in a leather of the same shiny-wet carmine color. The blood smears beneath his thumb, and Jonathan watches in slack-jawed silence as the man brings his hand to his mouth and licks. Just the once, but firm and thorough, tongue pressed flat. He hums and– By the gods, Jonathan doesn’t know if he’s ever heard a man sound so _delighted_ in his life.

“Are you here for the Queen?” the man asks, pauses, amends, “No, no: not _you_. What are you here for?”

Jonathan inhales, closes his eyes against the sharp throb of pain, says, “The library.”

The man laughs, a short huff of air and sound, but genuine enough. Jonathan might find it charming if not for the gush of his blood between his fingers.

“The _library_. Suffice it to say you’ve found it.”

“Y– Ah– And you found me.”

“Yes. I suppose I did,” he glances down at the books strewn about, the piles Jonathan had made, now soaked through with his blood. Jonathan watches him read titles, look up at the empty places in the shelves — taking stock, he realizes. Like a librarian — or, more aptly, like a dragon with a hoard.

Jonathan’s hands have begun to go cold.

The man looks back to him suddenly, eyes alight with some unnameable thing that drives fear like a stake through Jonathan’s belly.

“Have you a name?” he asks — and Jonathan is struck by the sudden, lurching realization that he should _not_ , under _any_ circumstances, tell this man his name.

Jonathan says nothing. They wait, the both of them, silent save for Jonathan’s shallow, labored breathing. The man does not move, gone utterly still, crouched there like a gargoyle on a spire. Jonathan suspects get could wait there an eternity, frozen in place while Jonathan’s life ebbs quietly away. He tries to swallow the thought down — and the fear, too, though it sticks thick like mucus to the roof of his mouth — but the man’s gaze flickers immediately to the movement of his throat.

Jonathan is keenly aware, then, of what it must feel like to be a mouse beneath a lion’s paw, pinned by the tail and squirming.

As if reading his thoughts, the man’s gloved hand drops to Jonathan’s chest, fingers trailing down the center of it, stopping at the dip of his stomach where he is soft and hurt and so very, very vulnerable.

“Won’t you tell me?” he tries, “It’s only polite.”

Jonathan shakes his head, clenches his jaw tight against the urge to speak. The man’s face turns petulant, displeased, mouth turned down in a moue of disappointment — but his eyes betray him. Giddy, gleeful. Thrilled at the prospect of warm blood and a beating heart to pump it. _Blood drunk_ — though in a way more akin to moths and butterflies than to beasts. The man’s hand walks down Jonathan’s side, horribly, terribly playful, stops when his fingers brush the side of Jonathan’s hand where it covers and protects his wound. Jonathan’s heart rabbits in his chest. Cold seeps into him from the floor at his back.

The man’s eyes gleam wicked in the dark. Jonathan knows better than to try and brace himself against what is sure to come next, but he tenses all the same. The man stares him in the eyes and holds him, holds him fast, and Jonathan cannot so much as twitch beneath that awful gaze. It is always the eyes. _Always_ the eyes, Jonathan thinks, stuffed full to the throat with fear as the man fits his hand beside Jonathan’s own and– And–

Jonathan does not scream. He doesn’t. He shouts the pain out through gritted teeth, kicks his legs in vain while the man’s fingers (long, slender, depraved) dig into the wound at his side, shove right into the hot, wet place where he’s split open. His head cracks against the floorboards where he throws it back. The pain lances, pierces, stabs through him, whitehot like fire beneath his skin, pulsing like poison.

“Of course; pardon my manners,” Jonathan hears the man say, words simultaneously too far to hear and too near to miss. The fingers dig deeper into him, stretching, reaching, tearing at him. Jonathan can feel each one of them, index through pinky, smooth in their leather and sticking in his insides. Tears blur his vision, warm on his face, cold where they creep into his hairline.

“ _Please_?” the man asks, voice low and sweet and mocking. He withdraws his fingers, lets them linger there at the edges of Jonathan’s wound, and Jonathan rushes to reapply pressure, clumsy though he may be.

“Fanshawe–” he starts, breaks in a gasp. He pants, closes his eyes tight — reopens them when the man’s fingers tap wetly at the back of his hand. “Jonathan Fanshawe,” he struggles out, his very own name ripped from him like a hook from the cheek of a fish.

The man smiles, slow and creeping, “And what, may I ask, _are_ you, Jonathan Fanshawe?”

“I’m a– Gods. I’m a doctor. A surgeon,” Jonathan says. And then he laughs, high and thready and barely recognizable as his own, and wheezes, “And I am… I do believe I must be dying.”

“Well,” the man tuts, patting his soaked hand against the center of Jonathan’s chest like a man might pat a dog on the side, “Despite your garb, you seem like a very clever boy, Dr. Fanshawe.” His hand raises to his face, turning and twisting in the light, watching the way Jonathan’s blood shines and runs, stains the white frills of his cuffs. He looks back to Jonathan, sharp and curious like a cat, and asks, “Do you want to die?”

Jonathan’s mouth opens. Closes. He feels like he’s walking into the jaws of some yawning thing, some giant maw. He can feel the warm breath of it soaking into his clothes, the smooth drag of its teeth on his skin. Pain stabs through him from his side, the back of his head. He notes his breathing becoming difficult — notes, too, how he can no longer feel the heat of his blood on his hands, despite their press directly into the source of it.

“No,” Jonathan says, and shakes, bloody and prone, as those massive jaws close in around him.

“Lovely,” the man says — and sounds strangely like he means it. He moves suddenly, as graceful as he is quick, efficient in the movements of his limbs as he stands from his crouch. Jonathan watches him warily. Watches him unfold like some winged, long-legged thing, walking away. Watches him until he disappears somewhere behind Jonathan’s head. His footsteps lead away with the same light, leather-on-wood tapping, quieting down, beat by beat, until all that is left is Jonathan’s heart thumping in his ears.

The silence settles, wet and cold like the snow that falls beyond the castle walls. Jonathan lies there, just as wet, just as cold. He prays that the man has not left him — and has just enough sense left in him to shy at the vehemence of his own thoughts. But he does not want to die. He does _not_. Not here. Not where he may very well be lying atop the answers he seeks, bleeding into the pages that hold them captive.

Jonathan grinds his teeth together, far back where his teeth begin to plateau, listens to the percussive crunch of his molars scraping together. He tries to move his fingers, to feel for the edges of his wound, finds that it is difficult to differentiate his own flesh from the leather of his coat. He closes his eyes.

And startles at a touch to his shoulder. Jonathan comes back to himself with a gasp that chokes him, a stab of pain that winds him, and looks up to see the man’s bone-white slice of a grin shining down at him.

“Easy,” he soothes, and his hands slide deftly beneath Jonathan’s shoulder blades. He lifts, hauling Jonathan up and back, and what little breath Jonathan’s managed to drag back into his lungs leaves them in a whine — a _keen_ , pathetic and high. The man pulls Jonathan into his lap, back propped against the slope of his thighs where he kneels, and it feels like ripping, like rending, like leaving his legs behind, mangled and wrenched apart at the waist where the tear has already started.

The crown of Jonathan’s head pushes into the man’s stomach. His hair catches at the gold-trimmed fabric. He flexes his toes in his boots — just to make sure.

The man’s hand comes to his face, sticky-damp with blood and gristle, smearing it where it meets Jonathan’s tear-wet cheek. His thumb brushes the soft place beneath Jonathan’s eye, fingertips at his jaw, tilting his head back.

Jonathan suspects what is to come even before he sees it — and is proven correct by the rustle of cloth behind his head, the muffled clink of glass, the gleam of a slim little vial held in the man’s other hand. Jonathan watches him pop the cork with his thumb, watches him stroke the length of the vial with something one might feel compelled to call reverence.

Jonathan tries to swallow and struggles with it. The man hums, down deep where Jonathan can feel it reverberate through his skull. His hand comes close, the vial dark and shining in the dim, orange light. Jonathan breathes deeply, as deeply as he can before his stomach spasms with pain, and swears that he can smell it. That smell like no other, that smell like _every_ other. Saturated into every crooked cobblestone, every warped piece of wood, every tired length of leather. Soaked into the very air they breathe, stronger now where it sits below Jonathan’s nose. Heady and tangy, thick on the breath of both man and beast alike.

Blood. Treated and processed and refined– But blood, all the same.

“Wh… Whose?” Jonathan asks. A syllable and a half and it’s already far more than he has room for.

“Does it matter?” the man replies — and, no, Jonathan doesn’t suppose it does. He is spared the trouble of further consideration by the sticky-slick press of the man’s thumb to his lower lip, followed shortly by the hard, smooth edge of the vial.

The vial tilts, just a nudge, begging entrance at Jonathan’s mouth. The man’s fingers help him along, gentle now where they rest at the hinge of his jaw, coaxing him back and open and soft — and Jonathan parts his lips, breathes slow through his nose, and accepts.

Blood floods his mouth — no slow trickle, just a pouring gush of thin, slimy fluid over his tongue. It coats his teeth, the roof of his mouth, all the way up into the secret, velvety places between his gums and the insides of his cheeks. Pinks run red and whites bleed orange, and Jonathan tastes metal and meat and saline and candy. He swallows it down, tries not to vomit at the way it clings to his throat, slides wet and filmy down through his chest, his guts. He can feel it in his sinuses, like it’s trying to travel against gravity — like it might come up and drip from his nose. The blood is _warm_ , he realizes, and Jonathan wonders whether it has been heated from the outside, body-warmed by the hand that held it, or from the inside, stolen from a body that has yet to cool.

Jonathan can feel it working as he takes it down, can feel it in his stomach, can feel it washing over his innards, anemic pinks and fatty yellows all gone dark and red. It moves through him like something living, something seeking, something _knowing_. Sapient, sentient. Conscious. It courses through him like his own blood ought to, finding his split flesh and his ruined muscles and his violated organs. Mending him, building him out from the inside. It warms where it finds cold, clots where it finds bleeding.

And it hurts, too. Of course it does, aching in him like decay, like old, quiet decomposition — even as it works to make him whole.

But the ache is dull and flat, and Jonathan welcomes it in the wake of the ripping, the stabbing, the piercing. It is soothing in its own way, and he groans with the bone-deep relief of it. His vision swims, but the man’s teeth shine with a pearly clarity, blocking out his sight.

The man takes the vial away, finally, glass clicking against Jonathan’s bottom teeth as it pulls back. The last bit of blood dribbles down into the cracks and creases of Jonathan’s lip, and Jonathan licks at it without thought.

“Another,” the man says, and no sooner does Jonathan draw a breath than the next vial comes before him.

The man flicks the cork off, just as he had before, so comfortable in his movements that Jonathan struggles for a moment to find his tongue. His hand returns to Jonathan’s face, thumb once more at the seam of his mouth, and Jonathan twitches away.

“Why?” he asks, alarmed and relieved in equal measure to hear his voice ring out clear and rich, if slightly breathless.

The man pauses. Jonathan looks up at him, watches him watch Jonathan. A blood-specked shape, head cocked like a bird. His red thumb seals over the open top of the vial.

“Come now,” he says, smile curling his words where they drip from his tongue, “Can’t I wish simply to right my own wrong?”

“No,” Jonathan shakes his head — and finds it difficult, still, “Not you. You… You’ll want something.”

“Will I?”

“You will. And I have nothing to give you.”

“Oh,” the man says, “No,” and Jonathan does not know if a person’s eyes could ever be any brighter, “I don’t think that’s true.”

The fingers of the man’s spare hand flex where they rest against his jaw, warm through his glove, possessive where they graze the bare flesh of his throat. The snare: set and covered. Jonathan does not want to ask.

Jonathan finds that he must.

“What would you ask of me, then?”

The man’s grin cuts, guts him all over again. “Just my name,” he replies, and Jonathan quivers, “I must confess– I would very much like to hear you say it.”

“Wh–” Jonathan chokes, strangles on the twist of his own tongue, swallows, “Tell me what it is, then.”

“Jonah,” he says. He pauses, pleased and preening, and adds, “Magnus.”

 _Jonah_. Jonathan would laugh if he could — and laughs anyways, soundless and airy, nothing to hear save the soft, wet squish of meat on meat, breath squeezed right out of him. Jonah looks very, very hungry.

“Suits you,” Jonathan tells him, honest in the way that only dying men can be, and then, snare closing quietly around his throat like a collar of teeth, he says, “Pleasure to make your acquaintance, Jonah Magnus.”

Jonah purrs. Jonathan can feel it like a pulse, like a heartbeat in his head, pressing bruises into the inside of his cranium, slipped into him right there between brain and bone. His hand reappears, tip of his thumb circling the lip of the vial once, twice, before it presses, instead, to Jonathan’s.

He opens.

“The pleasure is mine, Dr. Fanshawe,” Jonah says, “Drink up, now.”

The blood is still warm.


End file.
